So, I'm pretty bored. Waiting for Michelle to get home before I go shoot two duals for St. Viator High School. Spent most of the day emailing people about the IHSA State Finals Video and coaches about their highlight videos.

Wasted some time on Comicbookresources.com and Illinoismatmen.com.

Blah. Nothing interesting to report. After the meet, I'll be stopping at the gym and then I'll probably write Bloodshot. For some reason, I've been having a hard time getting rolling on that in the last few weeks. I rattled off the the first 30 pages and I think I know where I want to go, but for some reason I've had trouble writing it. One of the major reasons I started this blog.

Wow, the Dow and the Nasdaq are up today. Not much but every little bit counts.

Had the Upstate Eight, which strangely enough has twelve teams, conference tournament seeding meeting tonight. Things went about as good as expected. The team is still very young and kinda mediocre overall. But "mediocre" is a big step up form "sucks."

Couldn't believe some of our coaches: One guy doesn't bring his kids record sheets! Another tries to get a 0-0 kid seeded because he won the freshman conference two years ago... I wanted to shoot myself in the face.

I think we have a legit shot at getting two in the finals. A third would be nice but I'm not pushing it. Honestly, there is no reason every single one of those kids can't place in the top 6 and that really the goal this year. We haven't been a good tournament team, mainly cause we don't wrestle enough "real" tournaments, in my always humble opinion. But it's time to push the kids and expect more out of them. We've turned into a pretty decent dual team, but we have a lot of guys with okay records. But all that gets thrown away in tournament time.

I keep telling the kids that I want to have a "conflict of interests" down state this year, as I produce the State Championship video for the IHSA. We'll see what happens.

COMICS

Read Superman Beyond #2. I love Grant Morrison but I gotta go back and reread it again. I was at Panera and was a bit distracted which can really effect reading his stuff.

Dark Avengers #1 was pretty cool. They could've called this book Thunderbolts without missing a beat seeing as it's pretty much a direct continuation of what Warren Ellis was doing, which makes it A-OKAY in my book. No real big surprises, but it kinda reminds me of Busiek's original concept of villains disguised as heroes. Plus, it's always good to see Norman Osborn back in action. Bendis writes him a bit more in control of himself than Ellis did, but it should be a fun title.

Green Lantern #37 Four words: Hal Jordan Red Lantern. Didn't see that coming.

Justice League. Meh. Too old school for me.

Mighty Avengers #21: I like Slott on Spider-Man. This issue was okay. I like his line-up and I'll finish this first arch up, but I may end up trade waiting in the future.

MOVIES

Waiting on Noah to finish up Grotesque's Score. I really like the most recent cut and I had a good conversation with John Wesley Shipp (the mother freaking Flash!), our lead about it. I may have actually made a movie that isn't a complete embarrassment to myself and my family!

People tell me that I'm way too hard on 7 Minutes but it was what it was, a 30k digital movie by a first time director with a cast of non-actors. Someday I may take another crack at it, but right now, I would like to move on.

There's a lot that I'd like to see before Oscar time. The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Turino all look great. I'm still pissed that I never got around to seeing The Changeling while it was in theaters. JMS is my favorite comic writer (his Spidey was new and interesting and his Thor is...wow), I really should've caught his movie.

OTHER

It's 2 am. I'm out.

Later

J.D.

First blog

Hi,  I'm J.D. Oliva, 28 year-old filmmaker/writer/wrestling coach/videographer/entrepreneur/White Sox fan/avid comic reader/ect. 

So, this is the first entry of my new blog and if you're reading this, I'm going to have to ask you...why?

Seriously though, I decided to start this blog because I've had a lot of downtime lately, the video bus. is kinda slow in January, I have plenty of Feb and March bookings, but Jan on the whole pretty much sucks. So, I want to use this extra time to get going on some writing. I was doing really good for awhile (I have the 2nd draft of my comic complete and I'm thirty some pages into my new screenplay) but sometimes I sit at my computer and just waste time on the internet. Comicbookresources.com takes up much more of my time than I car to admit.

So, I decided to start this blog as kind of a catharsis for my random thoughts. I got the idea from reading Chuck Dixon's blog (http://www.dixonverse.net). It seems like a great way to get those annoying thoughts out of your head so you can focus on more important things, even if no one reads them (more a plus for me than Mr. Dixon). Plus, it's always good to warm your figures up before really writing or (video) editing.

Anyway, most of the stuff I'm going to talk about here are going to revolve around movies, comics and wrestling. That's pretty much everything outside of my family and God (I'll probably talk about him a lot too) that I'm interested in.

I also joined twitter which is basically lazy blogging, so it should be a perfect fit for me.

Anyway, I'm going to post about one of these per day. So, I'm out.

Later

J.D.